In everyday life, black-and-white is an exception. Normally, we are surrounded by colours, we express emotions through colours, we approach colours, we are attracted or repelled by colours, colours call and entice us, they draw our attention. Black and white is life stripped of colour.

It is easy to understand that after the invention of colour photography Thomas Lüttge (born in 1941) took black-and-white photographs in the 1960s, in the era of minimal art, and that in the 1970s the photographer Gabor Kerekes (1945 - 2014) took b/w photographs in Cold War Hungary, we can comprehend that. And today? Michael Kenna, born in 1953, takes only b/w photographs. What does b/w photography have to offer today? This question can be raised, but it cannot be answered. The reasons for b/w photography are too varied and individual. But a few things can be ascertained:

Precisely because of the absence of colour, b/w photography can stimulate the imagination. In the winter, after it has snowed, only a few things remain visible, and in b/w photography, many details disappear in the grey tones, the gaze calms down, the world appears clear and simple. Light becomes the narrator; light and shadow, more is not necessary.

Michael Kenna sometimes chooses the night for taking his photographs, when in the pale light of the moon the landscape is even more deprived of detail, and the pure form emerges all the more clearly. Then the moonlight makes what is familiar seem new and removed, and the photograph no longer depicts reality, but rather resembles something abstract, like a short poem, a Japanese haiku.

Gabor Kerekes’ work circles around the futility of existence, of waiting, of vain expectations. The abandoned factories seem like monuments of forsakenness in the middle of nowhere – the same is true for man himself. Nothing and nobody is moving, everything is mysteriously veiled, waiting to be brought to life – but the prince won’t come.

So can black-and-white photographs not be photos in the true sense, but are proxies for a thought that has become a picture? For the enquiring advance of the gaze seeking what is invisible in the visible? Does the photographer want to see more than he sees? Thomas Lüttge speaks of the “desire to sense in the archetypes attitudes that go beyond a current, subjective feeling”. The chair stands in the midst of chaotic shadow lines, the tree trunk rises from an indeterminate lying on the ground and strives upward, in the monotonous uniformity of houses and sun sails, one sail sticks out and casts a broad shadow on the ground. There is the one thing where everything is concentrated, it is the forte in the piano, the decision in indecisiveness, – after all, the photographer interprets the world also with his gaze.

BERLINARTPROJECTS is presenting a group exhibition with the six gallery artists Daniel Harms, Ulrich Riedel, Yaşam Şaşmazer, Eda Soylu, Claudia Vitari and Meike Zopf. The exhibition will continuously re- constitute itself as individual works are being swapped and therefore context and effect change simultaneously. The works of the artists give an insight into different views of the world, filtered and shaped by their own thoughts, experiences and world views. Whether the art involves reflections, critical perceptions or alternative concepts, each new setting creates its own reality. The works mutually enrich each other, again and again emphasizing new aspects. The
￼replacement of one work therefore also affects the entire exhibition - as new concepts and relations are gained, others disappear its reality becomes ‘recharged’.
One remarkable position in the show are the ‘dying flowers in concrete’, that will be shown to a later time during the exhibition. The young Turkish artist Eda Soylu embeds flowers in concrete. At the beginning they are still able to draw water from the slowly drying material while then gradually they dry out and die.
The pieces shown range from drawings and paintings to photography and sculpture. The cultural backgrounds are equally diverse; as the artists originate from countries such as Turkey, Italy as well as Germany.

We are proud to announce the eleventh solo exhibition by Isa Genzken at Galerie Buchholz. Isa Genzken conceived this exhibition around “El Salvador”, her major Hyperbolo sculpture from 1980. She presents this work juxtaposed with with new work from her current production.

“Proceeding from her geometric drawings of 1973, in which elements of the work were set in motion, Genzken now began to mobilize viewers themselves and to define sculpture as a series of performance events in space to be executed by the beholder. Utilizing a complex process, Genzken would go on to produce elongated, almost floating sculptures that lay on the floor as spatial translations of her drawings. In these works, as Benjamin Buchloh explains them, she took literally Barnett Newman’s expansion of the picture surface into space, which at the same time determines the position of the viewer and her own ‘zip’ in three-dimensional space. At first Genzken concentrated on ellipsoids, or shapes that have contact with the floor at only one spot in the middle; finally she moved to opening up their forms and developed hyperboloids that touch the floor only at their extremities. By cutting, hollowing, and twisting, as well as utilizing special color and surface combinations, Genzken managed to create more extreme, ‘faster’ forms. It was impossible to fully appreciate their elongated, curving shapes from a single viewpoint. Whereas the forms embody speed in themselves, viewers are forced to virtually conquer the sculptures in space and to experience them, in individual sections and from new perspectives, as a ‘curving continuum of space and time'. As one explores them, it becomes clear that the lines of the sculptures never come together, pointing 'to open space as an always omitted third element.’ Between 1976 and 1982, Genzken produced a total of thirteen Ellipsoids and six Hyperbolos, ranging in length from ten to more than thirty feet. In these works, the artist set new standards with respect to technology-supported construction and, at the same time, worked to expand the accustomed parameters of sculpture. The definition of space, the permanence of materials, the deployment of volumes, weight, mass, and gravity, issues such as interior and exterior, and questions of site – all concerns typical of sculpture – came into new, provocative focus in these works.”

Sabine Breitwieser, “The Characters of Isa Genzken: Between the Personal and the Constructive, 1970-1996”, in ‘Isa Genzken. Retrospective’, exhibition catalogue, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2013/2014; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 2014; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas 2014/2015, ed. by The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2013, pp. 28.

“The logical and, in my view, most interesting development thus arises from the transition from the first full Ellipsoids to the open objects and the two- or three-part objects, in which that same disassociation of movement is made visible. At the same time, Genzken progressively abandons the three primary colors in favor of in-between colors that clearly accentuate the changing structures, albeit with an element of determined evasiveness. A process ensues here that deliberately sets itself apart from all minimal art. The referential nature of the objects already points in that direction. These general characteristics of the works are reinforced by a systematic non-identity of form. In these hollow or multipart objects, which are seemingly intended to fundamentally embody the possibility of constructing a geometric entity, there is – contrary to expectation and by virtue of their differing lengths and diameters and the irregular distribution of their mass-a constant relativization of the congruence of the form with itself. Evidence is thereby generated and retracted in the same breath, through the ensuing demand that it should be accepted as evidence. A concrete axiom is constructed yet its coherence undermined. Logic is neither clouded nor contradicted; it is deferred with the help of and on behalf of its own means. Each of these objects maintains its own secret excesses and disclaimers, in that, by dismantling its inner structure, it lays bare the entirety of its organizational laws and, by means of this same intervention, displaces them through transformation. One momentarily has a sense of how much caprice there is in a concept such as that of precision and how much guile there is in a rationale that rapidly deteriorates. Because no figure has exactly the qualities that we would by definition ascribe to it, the asymptotic adjustment of object and law is constantly drawn into the realms of the admissible.”

Isa Genzken will be represented in this years 56th Venice Biennial, All the World’s Future, curated by Okwui Enwezor. She will present a new large-scale outdoor sculpture along with an installation of maquettes of each of her realized and unrealized outdoor sculptural projects.

‘EXPOSURE’, on view from 10th July 2015, is the second show Jonathan Yeo has exhibited with Circle Culture Gallery and the first time he has presented works in Hamburg. The exhibition will primarily consist of Yeo’s Leaf Works, created using the artist’s unique and celebrated form of pornography collage. It will be the first – and possibly the last – time these works will be shown together as a group in their own right.

Yeo started the Leaf Works series in 2008. Pieces from the series have been on display in New York and Los Angeles, in 2008 and 2010. Several new artworks have been created specifically for the exhibition in Hamburg, including a major gold-leaf heart painting entitled ‘Planten un Blomen’.

The Leaf Works are the furthest extension in Yeo’s Porn Collage series, which explores representations of the body and the proliferation of pornography in the media. The Porn series started with a portrait of the former American President George W. Bush, in 2007, which gained attention of the media and public around the world. This, in turn, led to a series of portraits of people who in some way trade, or traded, on their sexual morality.

Yeo was first drawn to pornography as a medium after the birth of his second daughter, which made him increasingly aware of the sexualisation and objectification of women in the media and advertising. As well as the collaged portraits and Leaf Works, Yeo created a number of other figurative works in the form of classical nudes, also made from explicit material. These pieces, such as ‘Catherine and Pepper’, which will be on display at Circle Culture Gallery, also play on the canon of art history by transforming the traditionally acceptable portrayal of the human body into something controversial through the use of pornographic representations of the nude body.

The Leaf Works continue to play with the viewer’s expectations in their subtle transformation of form and subject. Their subversive content challenges the viewer – the soft, falling leaves on closer inspection reveal themselves as fragmented genitalia and sexual acts taken from pornography magazines – thereby commenting on pornography’s place in society, in that it has become almost invisible through its pervasiveness. This concept is taken even further in the wallpaper inspired by this series. Here, the pornographic leaves are designed to incorporate the same sexual imagery, but their form, reminiscent of old-fashioned repeat pattern wallpaper, further conceals the source material. This wallpaper was presented for the first time at the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Centre, Athens in 2009. Since then it has been re-configured several times and the newest version will be on display at Circle Culture.

The last show Jonathan Yeo exhibited at Circle Culture, ‘(I’ve Got You) Under My Skin’, in 2012, gained worldwide attention and also focused on a type of exposure, with a series of paintings depicting patients undergoing plastic surgery. A surgeon’s markings on pre-op bodies indicate where the skin will be cut, pulled and lifted, reversing the traditional view of the classically, beautiful nude female form to one of clinical bodily representation. The corpus becomes a fragile, biological vessel subject to self-inflicted violence as a result of today’s unrealistic beauty expectations, influenced by popular media.

This new exhibition seeks to challenge the way imagery is read by society and how it is affected by it, as well as continuing to explore Jonathan Yeo’s fascination with representations of the human body and identity.

The exhibition will be on view from July 10th – September 18th, Thursday – Friday, 12 pm – 7 pm on Bismarckstraße 98, 20253 Hamburg.

The gallery will be closed from July 16th – August 7th due to summer break.

Little is known about the artist William Crawford. His erotic drawings were found in an empty house in Oakland, California. Crawford drew on the reverse side of the duty rosters of a California prison, often on colored and sometimes damaged paper the size of which varied – it is evident that he utilized whatever was available as a surface on which to receive his images. Some of the approximately 950 works are signed and dated; they originate in the 1990s. The aesthetic of the depictions of sexual fantasies corresponds to the ethos of gangster and pornographic films of the 1970s and 1980s and therefore one may assume that William Crawford was imprisoned for many years.
The erotic drawings convince through a masterly compositional arrangement, unusual perspectives and the play with both elaborate and only partially suggested picture fields. A comparison with the playful erotic style of an Eric Stanton or Tom of Finland can be made. A stylized background skyline is typical in the minimal interiors, which are reminiscent of simple television studio sets. Beside erotic encounters between men and women, Crawford drew gangster scenes, shared drug consumption and group sex scenarios. A recurrent figure in the fantasies is a man with a short Afro and a moustache – presumably the artist.
On some of the sheets written dialogs can be found. Crawford always drew storyboards in the style of comics whose connections in the oeuvre can be reconstructed on up to 30 successive sheets. His stories are erotic, humorous, mysterious, and pornographic. They show fascinating scenes of lust, debauchery, and sexual gratification. In a unique drawing style they reveal the fantasies of a man, who was presumably for years cut off from the exterior world and therefore from the possibility of their realization.

The exhibition is the first presentation of William Crawford’s works in Berlin. Especially in the last months his work received a lot of attention, among other things through the exhibition “System & Vision” at David Zwirner Gallery in New York.

Lars Dittrich and André Schlechtriem are pleased to present DRAWINGS FROM THE HAND, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of works by the New York-based artist Asger Carlsen. In Carlsen’s art, the montage and coordinated superimposition of digital imagery engenders a brutal aesthetic that revolves around a reassessment of the graphical process and a distortion of the subject of the silhouette. In DRAWINGS FROM THE HAND, the Danish artist opens up the fictional hybrid bodies of his earlier series HESTER and WRONG to create photographic ‘objects’ that combine archaic-earthy with cosmic-immaterial overtones. DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM presents these works, which are both disturbing and profoundly alluring, in three formats: 5 pigment prints of digitally synthesized photographs, 8 multilayered ‘marble drawings’ on hot press watercolor paper, and an iridescent transmorphic sculpture based on a 3-D print.

In the gallery’s first room, large-format black-and-white pigment prints feature extreme ‘objects’ on mirrored black glass surfaces. Carlsen, who works with electronic pens on tablet computers, collages self-portraits with shots of undefined materials and hones the gestural vocabulary of Photoshop image editing—as in the time-consuming process of contour softening—to Old-Masterly precision. The artist constructs a raw and amorphous materiality that blends textures resembling flesh, metal, or concrete with sometimes futuristic-looking surface structures. A former crime scene photographer for the New York Police Department, Carlsen has a trained and sensitive eye for the ways bodies appear in death and contrasts figural details such as eye sockets, noses, and ears with rough fissures and spots that might be bloodstains. Each work consists of numerous—in some instances, over two hundred—photographic sources the artist assembles step by step in an editing process that can take up to six weeks. Where the earlier series foregrounded strategies of decomposition and obscured the seams between different skin images, the new works envision a human face broken up and transformed in a utopian alteration of its physicality.

Executed in the format of 16 by 11 inches, the ‘marble drawings’ show semitransparent chromatic scenarios illuminated by a gentle light seeping in from the edges. As the artist pencils the silhouette of his own face into the pictures, the invisible gestural work of the draftsman’s hand on the computer attains material reality on the physical medium. These works, too, are composed of numerous heterogeneous visual layers, for which Carlsen uses photographs of the bathroom floor in his apartment in New York’s Chinatown. The layers of faded linoleum scarred by the passage of time recall networks of veins, maps, hematomas, or, in some cases, cross-sections of organs. In the formative interplay with these contingent patterns, the unexpected intimacy of imagery from the artist’s private space and his facial contour also invites personalized readings.

At the center of the exhibition stands a 3D photopolymer resin print of a sculpture that radiates an immaterial sheen. Scaled to match the photographic pieces, it is coated with metallic auto body paint. The asymmetric relief structure, painted in a dark silver hue and supported by a golden sphere, is an abstract rendition of the artist’s facial features. The work’s amorphous and almost virtual quality calls the status of classical sculpture in question and heightens a tendency that is already implicit in the photographic series: Carlsen’s creative efforts aim at the conception and thorough analysis of a sort of hyper-sculpture that leaves the viewer in perpetual doubt whether what she sees are analogue depictions of real objects or products of synthetic Photoshop design.

Asger Carlsen’s DRAWINGS FROM THE HAND transcends the conventional boundaries of sculpture, Photoshop editing, and classical drawing to cultivate a zone of referential in-between—objects that exist beyond the categories of idea, draft, and material implementation. The artist’s hand, previously invisible in his work, now emerges into view in a variety of registers: in concrete pencil strokes as well as indirectly, through fingerprints and traces of modeling visible in the photographed materials. The iconographic hermeticism of the earlier series gives way to an unexpected raw tactility, while the spectrum of associations broadens considerably: morgues, potter’s studios, and surfaces of comets now appear as atmospherically relevant loci of reference. The mute screams of the sealed hybrid bodies in Carlsen’s past works are transformed by the reassessed medium of drawing into the echo of a newly brutal physical reality.

DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM will publish a catalogue in conjunction with the exhibition. For press inquiries and further information, please contact Owen Clements at owen(at)dittrich-schlechtriem.com.